This is a great piece of work, Wendell.

Quoting Wendell Huffman :

> I have been interested in learning just what Peter Lassen knew in
> 1848 when he turned north on the Applegate road and pioneered what
> came to be called the Lassen trail.

One of the great mysteries of trail of trail histories--but we're learning more all the time.

> The difference in terms of the information Lassen carried is
> significant. If he merely went to Fort Hall in 1848, Lassen likely
> would have known about the discovery of gold and would seem to have
> deliberately been leading pioneers away from the gold fields. On the
> other hand, if he traveled east with Stockton in 1847 Lassen was in
> that party with both Joseph B. Chiles and John J. Myers.

Yes. Myers, of course, blazes the Hudspeth Cutoff in 1849. Later, he had an even more colorful career. After finding gold in Plumas County, he sailed to New York, returned to Missouri, and then followed his family to Caldwell County, Texas. He served as colonel of the Lone Star Mounted Rifles in the Civil War. After the war, he drove cattle to Salt Lake and then partnered with Joseph Geating McCoy to bring Texas cattle north. The veteran trailblazer laid out a trail from the Red River to Lockhart, Texas, that extended the trail Jesse Chisholm had mark for McCoy from the Red River to the Kansas Pacific Railroad in Abilene. Myers led the first cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail in 1867, and "Colonel Jack" sent tens of thousands of beeves to Kansas over the next years. He died in Lockhart in 1874, allegedly from the lingering effects of a dose of poison he received while being robbed of the profits from a cattle drive to Salt Lake.

> While there is a tendency to believe whichever story fits one's own
> inclination, I really wanted to determine which account was correct.
> Because I had not found the definitive answer in any published
> source, I thought I would share the result of my search. In fact, it
> was embarrassingly easy to set the matter to rest.

Now, for your key question: "Is it possible that Lassen- planning to head north on the Applegate trail-was on the north side of the Humboldt River, and therefore missed an encounter with the eastbound Mormons?"

"It appears (comparing the date of Lassen's letter in the "Brunswicker" with records of Chiles' party) that Lassen was ahead on Chiles on the trail in 1848."

He was. The Mormons met Samuel Hensley on 27 August, and on 30 August the company met the last major wagon party they encountered: the train led by Joseph Ballinger Chiles and Joseph R. Walker.

Another great source you'll find interesting is the Stockton party material in:

Gillespie Archibald H. Personal Papers of Archibald H. Gillespie, 1847-1860. Collection 133, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles Library. Digital finding aid at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft858007j9

March 11 - U.S.S. Congress, San Diego Harbor: R.F. Stockton to Gillespie. Letter signed. 2pp. I am resolved to go to Washington myself, if I can get there, as the only way to hear from the government. Will you send me word...as to the number of men, horses, mules, etc., that will be necessary to take us home comfortably and with the proper dignity as conquerors of the country, and when and where to start from.

It also describes the "Receipt to Stockton for $5324.57 for the purpose of purchasing animals and defraying the expenses of an expedition from California to the United States across the Rocky Mountains." I'm sure they bought enough "proper dignity" to make Brownie and all of FEMA proud.

I'll send a journal describing all the Mormon and overland sources related to this to you personally.

Meantime, here's my take on this:

HE ALWAYS GOT LOST: LASSEN'S CUTOFF AND BURNETT'S ROAD TO OREGON

Peter Lassen was born in 1800 near Farum, Denmark, and immigrated to the United States in 1829. Ten years later he traveled to Oregon, and by 1840 he had made his way to California, where he worked for John Sutter and in 1844 acquired a Mexican land grant of 22,000 acres on the east bank of the Sacramento River about ninety miles north of Sutter's Fort. His Rancho Bosquero prospered as he developed his talents as a millwright and cattleman. "Peter was a singular man, very industrious, very ingenious, and very fond of pioneering-in fact, of the latter stubbornly so," John Bidwell wrote about his Danish neighbor. "He had great confidence in his own power as a woodsman, but, strangely enough, he always got lost."

Lassen apparently appreciated the benefits Sutter enjoyed because his fort was located at the end of the California Trail, and Lassen may have hoped to put his own ranch in a similarly advantageous situation. He had guided Marine Lt. Archibald H. Gillespie and his black servant, Ben, through northern California to Frémont's camp on Klamath Lake, perhaps along the route he intended for his new trail. Lassen returned to Missouri in 1847, with Commodore Stockton, where he recruited a wagon party by next spring. Among its members were a Master Mason, Rev. Saschal Woods, who carried a Masonic charter issued by the Grand Lodge of Missouri on 10 May 1848 for Western Star Lodge No. 98 that listed L. E. Stewart as senior warden and Peter Lassen as junior warden.

Near the meadow at today's Rye Patch Reservoir, the Danish trailblazer turned his train of ten or twelve wagons northwest onto the Applegate Trail. The oasis at the edge of the Black Rock Desert was known after 1848 as Lassen's Meadow (or more often "Lawson's"). When Lassen turned south at Goose Lake and left the Oregon road, it quickly became apparent that there was no trail and the trailblazer was lost. To his exhausted and discouraged followers' good fortune, Lassen's tracks had led a company of Oregonians under Peter Burnett south. Burnett, along with forty-six wagons and about one hundred and fifty men, left Oregon City about 10 September, "well provided with provisions, and means of every kind necessary to enable us to accomplish the trip." The worst part of the trip was not in California but in the notorious canyon in the Umpqua Mountains that had brought so much grief to the 1846 emigrants. Burnett's men "followed Applegate's Southern route" to Tule Lake, where they turned southeast. After blazing forty miles of wagon road to reach Pitt River and the drainage of the Sacramento, "we came across a wagon trail made by a party of Immigrants from the United States, and conducted by Cap. Lawson as pilot." The Oregonians found the rancher and his followers in desperate shape, "lost in the mountains and half-starved." It took only ten or fifteen of Burnett's men to clear the obstructions and "cut out the road in one day as far as the timber extended - say fifteen miles - and did it as fast aas the wagons could follow." Lassen's people had converted their wagons into carts, and with the help of Burnett's party they reached the Sacramento Valley at the end of October.

Like most inspired shortcuts, Lassen's "cutoff" was actually several hundred miles longer than the main trail, and it quickly earned a variety of derogatory nicknames, such as "Lassen's Horn" and the "Death Route." The road would see substantial traffic over the next few years, but it quickly developed an unenviable reputation. "Everyone I have seen curses the route and Lawson too," wrote Elisha Perkins in February 1850. "It was feared he would be assassinated at one time." Lassen, however, never gave up despite losing his land and fortune in the gold rush. He served as a guide for the Pacific Wagon Road survey in 1857 before he was murdered on his trail while prospecting for silver in Black Rock Canyon in 1859. A monument in Susanville, California, commemorates the affable but inept Dane, and his memory lives on in the name of a national forest, a national park, a county, and an active volcano, Lassen Peak.

I've also found an interesting 1857 article in which Lassen claims he found Noble's Cutoff.